


Mother Moogle's Deluxe Gourmet Artisanal Cookies

by jukeboxhound



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Cookies, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 00:55:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7597048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxhound/pseuds/jukeboxhound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sephiroth had often heard people use "baking cookies" as an example of the mundane life he's never known, but he suspects it's only because none of those people had ever tried to bake cookies with Zack and Cloud.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother Moogle's Deluxe Gourmet Artisanal Cookies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ardwynna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardwynna/gifts).



> Gift for Ardwynna for the 2016 FF7 Exchange. Prompt: "Zack and Cloud team up to show Sephiroth some of the good things in life. Sex, food, playing with baby moogles, whatever. Platonic relationship is fine too." I, uh, hope that several thousand words of cookie baking and fluff at least touches on what you asked for? :D
> 
> I have a thing for Cloud's eyes. So does everyone in canon anyway.

...

It all started with a box of cookies.

"Those aren't cookies," Zack declares.

Sephiroth leans forward to look more closely at the box of _Mother Moogle's Deluxe Gourmet Artisanal Cookies (New Look, Same Great Taste!)_ sitting on the conference room table. "They're artisanal."

"They're fake. Posers. The secret ingredient isn't love, it's capitalism."

"So is the program making you a SOLDIER." Sephiroth leans back again, elbows on the chair's armrests, fingers laced casually over his abdomen. He looks like a king surveying his kingdom.

"I'm working the system from the inside."

"You work?"

Now that the staff meeting is over and the other SOLDIER officers and ShinRa executives have left, Zack pointedly kicks back, puts his feet on the expensive conference table, and flips Sephiroth off. "You know what we need to do, General Tasteless?"

"Update our natural disaster insurance?"

"Funny. Our weekend starts tonight and Cloud's actually getting some leave for a few days. We're coming over to your quarters and we're gonna make some real cookies."

"Oh, you are, are you?" Sephiroth asks sardonically.

"Protest all you want, but you know you can't resist those eyes Cloud makes."

"No, I don't know."

All right, fair point. Sephiroth's been on the receiving end of Zack's gushing but never actually met the kid. Zack smirked. "You'll learn."

…

Cloud is short but lanky with a default expression that Zack can't describe as anything other than 'stubborn,' occasionally 'come at me, I dare you,' and on a few notable occasions, 'Zack, you are my light and life and I'd go mad if I ever lost you.' Unfortunately for Cloud, his crazy hair and big peepers behind that thick scarf just make Zack want to squeeze the breath out of his adorable little lungs.

"Cloud, General Sephiroth. Seph, Private Cloud Strife. Now that we're all friends, let's get with the cookie dough."

He pushes past Sephiroth and heads for the kitchen, ostensibly to dump the shopping bags but in reality watching his two dork friends stare at each other awkwardly in the doorway. Cloud salutes, a bit too wild-eyed to pull off 'professional.' "Sir."

"At ease," Sephiroth says. "Please, come in."

Zack has to try so hard to hold in his laughter over Cloud's silent panic that it physically hurts. Sephiroth steps back and holds open the door until Cloud eases past him into the foyer and he can close it with startling finality. Zack calls out, "Cloud, roll up your sleeves and start cracking these eggs. Seph, drop your fancy shit and get in here, oh Planet, is that a box of those soulless cookies in this cupboard right here, what is wrong with you?"

"They were handing them out at one of the holiday staff meetings," Sephiroth calls out as he sheds his leather coat and heads into the bedroom to change. "They're festive."

Cloud wanders into the kitchen like a timid woodland creature expecting to get eaten at any moment, face half-hidden by his scarf, so Zack, as a purely altruistic guy needing a distraction from the loveless horror in Sephiroth's cupboard, makes Cloud feel better by grabbing him in a headlock and scruffling his hair. Cloud makes a hilariously offended noise that's more chocobo than human and tries to dig a bony elbow into Zack's ribs. _"Zack!"_

Zack almost points out that, hey, Cloud's not thinking about his embarrassment anymore, is he?

"Zack, if you asphyxiate a cadet in my quarters, I'm putting you on a mission to Icicle."

Zack says, "Aww, Cloud's tougher than he looks," but he lets Cloud go. Cloud quickly jumps back out of his reach, and then stumbles when he realizes Sephiroth is in what Sephiroth considers _loungewear_ and most people call _business casual_ with no leather in sight. Cloud suddenly freezes, furrows his brow, visibly switches trains of thought, and turns to Zack with a flat, "Wait, what do you mean, _tougher than he looks?"_

"Hey, why aren't you cracking these eggs?" Zack says brightly. "Sephiroth, start mixing all the wet ingredients together. Here's the recipe." He waves a piece of printed paper around. "Do you even have mixing bowls? Or, gods forbid, a whisk?"

"No," Sephiroth says.

"You're lucky you're pretty. At least Aeris had everything."

Cloud's peering at the recipe and delicately taking the required number of eggs out of the carton Zack had brought. "This is your girlfriend's stuff?"

"Had to borrow a cup of flour, if you know what I mean." Exasperation looks startlingly similar on both Cloud and Sephiroth's faces. "No, no, I mean, flour, flower…it's a pun, guys, stop looking at me like that."

"Puns are supposed to make sense."

"Just crack the damn eggs, Cloud."

Sephiroth's watching them from the threshold of the kitchen, not quite isolated but not quite there, either, which is exactly the opposite of what Zack wants. He wrangles a large bowl out of one of the shopping bags and sets it beside the recipe on the counter. After a few minutes of rummaging he finds the whisk and holds it out, but Sephiroth just looks at it like Zack's brandishing a weapon.

"Stop being dramatic. If I wanted to kill you with kitchenware I wouldn't – well, no, I would totally use a whisk because let's face it, death by whisk would be funny as hell to put in the obituary of someone who survived the greatest of Wutai's assassins, can you imagine the look on Godo's face? But seriously, take the damn thing."

Sephiroth's been trained well enough by now not to argue with Zack outside of official business. He pushes his sleeves up a pair of forearms that visibly flex with each movement – there goes the blush on Cloud's pale cheeks, poor kid – and solemnly takes the whisk.

"Isn't there a recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag?" Cloud asks. "Why aren't we using that one?"

"Because it's full of capitalism, Cloud, pay attention. Dump those eggs into Sephiroth's bowl when he's done."  Sephiroth is measuring out water and oil with painful precision like the sad nerd he is, and Zack groans. "Hey, Seph, relax, this isn't chemistry, you don't have to worry about the, the curvy bit of a liquid's surface – "

"The meniscus."

"Whatever, the point is that you don't have to be so exact. Ha, I think you'd have an aneurysm if you saw my parents' recipes."

"My mom's like that," Cloud volunteers, surprisingly, although he keeps his eyes down towards the counter. "It's always a pinch or a handful. I don't think I've ever seen her use a measuring cup."

Zack eyeballs a couple cups of flour and some baking soda into a second large bowl. "My parents always cooked together, which is both awesome and horrifying. Yay for breaking gender norms and sticking together, woe for both of them disliking recipes and never paying attention to what the other person's already added to the pot."

There's an awkward pause as the conversation would've normally invited Sephiroth to share his own little story, but…well, Zack is anything but stupid, never would've made it nearly as far as he has otherwise, and he knows how to read between the lines. He can guess that Sephiroth just doesn't _have_ his own little stories to share.

And Cloud, thank the gods for Cloud, who's learned how to read people pretty well even if it was for all the wrong reasons, says lightly, "What do you think, sir – you think Zack's inherited more than looks from his parents?"

Some of the tightness that had made Sephiroth's lips thin finally relaxes into a faint smile. "I imagine he at least inherited their resiliency. They would've needed it to raise him for sixteen years."

"I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult, so I'm going to take it as a compliment because otherwise I'd have to banish you from the kitchen and that'd be a waste of all my hard work. Are you two done yet?"

The eggs get whisked in with the oil and water and vanilla extract. Sephiroth holds the bowl still and stirs while Zack slowly pours in the dry ingredients. Cloud jumps up to sit on the counter to watch the mix slowly thicken.

"Shit, where's the butter? Did anyone get the butter?"

Those two seriously need to stop with the matching exasperation. Sephiroth digs through the bags and pulls out a box of stick butter. Glancing at the recipe, he opens the box, unwraps a stick, and drops it unceremoniously into the dough before Zack can finish crying, "No, wait!"

"What?" Sephiroth asks. "The recipe calls for half a cup of butter. These sticks are already measured out as half-cups and you said not to worry about being exact."

Zack fishes out the stick of cold butter, which is now coated in an uneven layer of gooeyness. "It's too hard to mix with the dough. It'll get all lumpy. You've got to melt it first."

"But the recipe doesn't say that."

"It's common sense!"

"You're being very inconsistent."

Cloud, still sitting on the counter behind Sephiroth's line of sight, is hiding a smile in the bag of chocolate chips he's filched and is now pillaging, the thieving little bastard. Zack yells, "Cloud! Drop it!"

"Woof," Cloud deadpans, and eats a few more chocolate chips.

…

Against seemingly all odds, two SOLDIERs and a cadet manage to mix a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough, roll it into small balls ("Big balls are better" – "Oh gods, this is the guy who said he'd be my mentor" – "Well, yeah, but I never said in _what")_ and get the cookie sheet into the oven.

That's about all they manage.

…

Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud look around Sephiroth's ultra-modern kitchen. A bit of cookie dough detaches from the ceiling and plops onto the floor with a damp splat.

"There's a lesson to be learned here," Zack says determinedly. "This is a good thing."

"In a competition with a small child for sheer destructive power, yes," Cloud mutters.

Zack can't decide if he's proud or irritated that Sephiroth's presence no longer leaves Cloud too starstruck to act like a little shit. "I'm making sure you're on the next graveyard shift for guard duty."

"You're _both_ on graveyard duty," Sephiroth says, probably because his kitchen is going to smell like burnt sugar and molding eggs for days.

"It's not our fault," Zack protests.

"You're right. Strife – _Cloud_ – you're cleared of all charges."

"Thank you, sir."

"I never should've introduced you two. I should've just slammed my fingers in a car door. I should've told Genesis that his poetry sucks."

"No need to be so extreme, Lieutenant."

Zack hadn't realized that Cloud had walked out of the kitchen until he comes back with a mop. "Excuse me, sir," Cloud says to Sephiroth, who shifts over so he can get to the sink. He plugs it up, turns on the faucet, and pours in a generous amount of soap.

"Uh, what're you doing, kiddo?"

"Cleaning." As the sink fills, he pulls out a roll of paper towels from somewhere under the sink and starts scooping up dough off the counter.

"There's no need, Cloud. ShinRa provides a cleaning service."

"Yes, sir," Cloud says. He keeps scooping and dropping dough-filled paper towels into the trash.

"Really, you're a guest – "

"Let it go, Seph. Once he's got an idea in his head, you could lock him in a basement underground for years and he'd still find a way to get out and do it."

…

Cloud will later accuse Zack of setting the whole thing up. Zack didn't, but he'll wish he had because it's just too perfectly ridiculous.

After most of the ruined cookie dough has been scraped up and only a little bit of sugar is still crunching underfoot post-mopping, the three of them stand side-by-side at the sink with Sephiroth washing the dishes, Cloud rinsing, and Zack drying. Zack can see Cloud sneaking glances up at Sephiroth every so often and has to keep reminding himself that the line between teasing and cruelty can be very fine, so he limits himself to nudging Cloud in the side every few minutes and winking outrageously.

The first few times, Cloud is able to ignore him and keep rinsing the dishes silently while Zack talks and Sephiroth throws in a comment every once in a while. Eventually, however, he nudges back. Zack nudges harder, making Cloud rock on his heels a bit, and Cloud calmly lifts a booted foot and brings it down hard on Zack's.

"Ow, fuckin' _A_ ," Zack hisses.

Sephiroth looks over suspiciously. "Are you two all right?"

"Yes, sir," they say in stereo. Being the wise man he is, Sephiroth lets it go. The quiet lasts for about thirty seconds.

"Hey, Seph, I ever tell you about the time I got Cloud to – shit, what the hell, Cloud!"

"Sorry, sir," Cloud says to Sephiroth.

"Why are you apologizing to Sephiroth? I'm the one with a broken foot!"

"You'll live."

Sephiroth sighs Zack's favorite sigh, the one that says _I'm questioning all of my life choices to figure out how the hell I got here,_ as Cloud holds up the sprayer he's been using to rinse the soapy dishes and says, "Zack, I _will_ use this."

"You wouldn't dare."

Except apparently Cloud _would_ dare, because when Zack twists the dish towel into a rope and snaps it at Cloud's ass, Cloud yelps and flails and sprays Sephiroth full in the face.  Everyone freezes.

"I'm going to die," Cloud whispers.

Sephiroth's face is a study in expressionless marble. The weight of his gaze holds Zack in place before it shifts to Cloud, whose eyes are doing that big, blue thing that once got him out of a lecture from the army's most notorious sergeant. Sephiroth softens a little, and Zack starts to relax, figuring that having Cloud as a secret weapon –

Sephiroth grabs the sprayer.

This is how, half an hour later, a cadet has gone from meeting the greatest general in history for the first time to standing in the general's bathroom doorway, wearing the general's borrowed clothes and absently swiping a towel through his hair while said general and his second-in-command just stand there feeling like creepy old lechers. It's odd to be able to see Cloud's whole face now that he's got nothing to hide behind.

"What?" Cloud asks.

"You should probably roll up those pant legs before you trip and take a header into the coffee table."

Cloud grumbles but hangs up the towel and does it anyway. It takes several turns to make the hem high enough that Cloud won't trip and take a header into the coffee table. Zack plucks at the front of the button-down shirt Sephiroth lent him to replace the uniform that Sephiroth himself had soaked. "I look like an idiot."

"A tilt of the head and standing far away, someone may actually mistake you for approaching something almost like the suggestion of a professional," Sephiroth argues.

"Yeah. An idiot."

Cloud straightens up and adjusts his own shirt, just a normal, plain, navy blue thing because Sephiroth obviously likes tormenting Zack, and asks, "So, um. Now what?"

"We don't have enough to try another batch," Zack says. "Especially since _someone_ ate half the chocolate chips."

So Sephiroth asks, "Do you like tea, Cloud?"

The classic flush of an introvert colors Cloud's face under Sephiroth's focused attention. "Yes, sir. I mean. I think so? It's really hard to get actual tea in Nibelheim. We usually just steeped herbs."

Sephiroth hustles them both into his living room, which seems even larger than it really is because of its painfully utilitarian aesthetic, and disappears back into the kitchen. Cloud pulls his bare feet up onto the white leather couch, opposite a white leather armchair, so his knees touch his chest, suddenly looking all of the mere fifteen years he is.

"You okay, kid?" Zack asks quietly. This time, when he nudges Cloud, he leaves his arm pressed against Cloud's.

"Yeah." He chews on his lip. "It's just. All this.  It's weird, isn't it?"

Zack sighs. "Sephiroth…hasn't had a normal life, you know? At least, not like ours. But he's a lot more than just a soldier and I think he needs to be reminded of that sometimes. And I figured - "

"Cookies. Really?"

Zack scruffles Cloud's damp hair again, but this time he lets his fingers stay tangled and Cloud doesn't try to push him away. "Oh, shut up. It worked, didn't it?"

Sephiroth brings back a tray with a gently steaming teapot, three plain _yunomi_ , and that fucking box of _Mother Moogle's Deluxe Gourmet Artisanal Cookies (New Festive Look, Same Great Taste!)_ and sets it down on the coffee table in front of the couch. Then he sits on his heels on the other side in a way that Zack immediately recognizes as Wutaian. "This is a green tea and roasted rice blend," Sephiroth says, filling the three cups with graceful motions and passing two of them over. Zack notices Cloud being very careful not to touch Sephiroth's fingers as he accepts a cup.

"And these," Sephiroth finishes with a smile that could actually be called _gleeful_ , "are cookies that have not destroyed my kitchen or Miss Gainsborough's borrowed things."

All right, maybe love isn't an ingredient the way cookies _should_ be made, but with Cloud curled up warm at his side and Sephiroth looking more relaxed than Zack has ever seen him, he could admit that at least it made a good topping.

…

Zack and Cloud fall asleep before their clothes finish drying. Sephiroth quietly cleans up the tea things, puts them away in the kitchen, turns down all the lights, and then stands over them for a moment, just looking. Zack is spread out, head tilted back over the couch and arms thrown wide like he's ready to either take on the whole world or hug it. It's a sight that became so reassuringly familiar during the war that even now, on a Friday night at home with no enemies or even paperwork around, it makes Sephiroth feel a little more grounded.

One of Zack's arms rests over Cloud, who's all but burrowed into Zack's side. More mature than the other cadets Sephiroth's seen, wary in a way that suggests he's learned to always watch his own back, but still just a kid. Maybe, one day, Cloud's curl could be as familiar as Zack's sprawl.

Sephiroth unfolds the soft, white blanket on the armchair and tucks its edges around the other two, making sure that it doesn't smother Cloud's already half-buried face, and grabs a book off a glass endtable. He settles in the armchair and turns on the lamp, its warm light spilling out unobtrusively, and starts reading.


End file.
